The Fatal Englishman (16 page)

If anyone were to have serenity it would be Winifred Nicholson; at least she had religious faith. In her short memoir, ‘Kit’, she expressed her feelings in the conventional language of her Christian Science; she concluded on a note of radiant optimism. But this was later. At the time she, too, was distraught. Her marriage to Ben was coming to an end and she went to the Isle of Wight, then to Paris, as though to be near Kit.

Beneath the clouds of her rhetoric, she had her characteristic moments of insight. ‘Besides the awful greatness of the universe, its solitude, its silence, its power, the vast deep unknown, there is only one thing as awe-inspiring, and that is the soul of a man who is inspired by a purpose that risks all to scale the high skies, to aspire to abstract beauty herself.’

‘Risks all’ did accurately suggest the recklessness of Wood’s pursuit of his artistic vision in the last summer of his life. He was not willingly self-destructive, but it is clear that he did not care whether the pursuit destroyed him: he was indifferent. And according to Winifred Nicholson, in a letter to H.S. Ede, Wood was aware of the possible consequences of his single-mindedness: ‘The tragic element was always hard upon his heels. What the tragic element was, I, not being God, do not know, but I felt that fear of it always from the moment I saw him … I have never felt fear like that – I remember it when we were walking along the quay in Paris at night under the quivering poplars, beside the quaking river – and he turned of a sudden and said, “I must enjoy every minute of this springtime in Paris – You know it might be one’s last.”’

Such scraps of conversation, even if only preserved in scribbled letters no one sought to publish, made fertile ground for a romantic myth. Wood’s physical beauty, the mystery of his awful death, his bisexual glamour, the parties of the beau monde, the drugs, the frenzied work in a ‘curious lonely country by the sea’,
the beautiful boy as victim of a cruel world… It is not surprising that Christopher Wood became in the 1930s a minor cult hero.

Much of the interest in him was of the kind that always attaches to such figures. Yet at the core of Wood’s life and work there remained something that was not so easy to dismiss. Winifred Nicholson was always a partial witness with an evangelical view to propound, but she was also a distinguished painter who knew Wood well. There was almost always something true in what she had to say. This is what she wrote in a private letter to H.S. Ede:

Those last pictures are to me at the passport office of madness. Of course I don’t value those last pictures as his highest work. It is a swan song, but like a swan song carries with it the haste, the doom of the end … not because his song is complete but because he knows it is his last chance – and he’ll put his soul into it to the last ounce. Not one of those pictures carry in them a bud – a new life for other pictures – I mean that no one who is creating would want to have one in his room – as one would his earlier ones. Any Cézanne, however late and complete, carries that bud – like all images of the Buddha carry the tiny image of the next Buddha to be, in the circle of their halo … High courage, daring is the key word of his painting – something flaunted in the face of suicide.

To Frosca Munster she wrote: ‘I consider, you know, that he practically gave his life for those pictures. He put everything he knew and every force he possessed into them, and then had nothing left to battle with his opium difficulty – which he could have coped with quite easily, like Tony and other people can, if he had not put his whole soul with that whole-hearted strength and impulse which was his more than anyone’s… Anyone who has painted knows that such work can only be done at great cost – incalculable cost.’

‘He practically gave his life for those pictures…’ This was the peculiarity of Christopher Wood. His own letters from Tréboul made it clear that he was prepared to ignore all danger in order to get his vision on to canvas. His determination for his art was stronger than his attachment to his own survival. Although such
a choice may be central to romantic myths, it is extraordinarily unusual in reality. What does it mean?

It implies, to begin with, a disregard for self, for the meanest animal instinct of self-preservation. Wood did have, periodically at least, that disregard. Although he was proud of his work, he was not proud of himself: he was not at ease with his nature, his impulses or his crippled body.

Winifred Nicholson wondered in her letter to Frosca Munster what it was that made Kit so unhappy, so eager to grasp the moments of calm and sunlight when he had stayed with her at Bankshead. She did not know, but thought it went back to his childhood, to his parents, to his illness and the pain it brought him.

At the end, on 21 August 1930 at Salisbury Station, Christopher Wood killed himself because he was of unsound mind, as the jury rightly believed. That unsoundness was precipitated by that most unromantic of causes – a ‘combination of factors’. He was suffering paranoid delusions, and it is possible that these were the first symptoms of a psychosis, of a schizophrenic breakdown. However, he was older than most young men when such illnesses begin; there was no family history of it; and there are simpler explanations of the symptoms. He had worked too hard, he had seriously abused powerful drugs and he was extremely worried about money. Ben Nicholson wrote to H.S. Ede: ‘Perhaps that lack of the money he seemed to need had got out of all hand. I know he wanted to marry Frosca but felt he had not the money and must give her the best of everything.’ It was one thing to be a penurious student in an attic studio; in fact it was part of the bohemian life, particularly when the hunger could be assuaged by large meals in Tony Gandarillas’s house in the Avenue Montaigne: but to have the woman you loved denied you a second time because you were still too poor, despite being, as he believed, ‘the first English artist since Whistler to be shown in Paris’ … this was bitterly hard to take.

Wood may also have felt what Winifred Nicholson described in his pictures: that there was no way forward, that he had forced his talent to the limit. If he were to progress from the paintings of 1930 he might, like Ben Nicholson, have had to start again.
Within a year, Nicholson had turned to abstract painting. The Seven & Five Society no longer exhibited figurative work, and English art, so slow to catch the tide of Modernism, began to find its way. Wood was not interested in this kind of painting. His vision derived from his apprehension of the real world. There is pathos in the fact that what may have been his last picture, ‘Zebra and Parachute’, is dominated by the Villa Savoye in all its harsh, abstracted angles. What was human – the man on the parachute – was already dead.

The subject of the delusions provided a further clue: the Guinness family. The Meraud affair humiliated Wood because it made public all his shortcomings: his drugs, his poverty, his homosexual past. He had not wanted these to be the talk of Cannes and Paris, particularly since his homosexual feelings were intimately bound up with his private debt to his mother and the passage of illness in his youth which had formed his creative ambition. He was frightened by the power of his feeling for Meraud, though he was also ashamed of his inconstancy in the year’s separation. Mrs Guinness had read his mind too well: she had doubled his humiliation.

The pressures on Christopher Wood at the end were really of his own devising. He had set out to make his art worthy of his mother and by it to repay her for having saved his life. In so doing, he would validate his life and its choices against the judgement of his father, of his father’s generation and all the presumptions of Huyton and Edwardian England. By the time he reached a point when his art was worthy of the task he had set it, the factors in the equation were changed and haywire. He himself had developed; he was exhausted, strung out from drugs, poor, unbalanced and with no artistic way forward. He had come up with the answer he had set out to find, but by then the questions had all subtly changed.

Wood’s paintings survived as pleasing and independent works of art with little need of literary explication. The much-remarked ‘simplicity’ of his character and the direct and figurative style both worked to his advantage. In the years since his death his
reputation has slowly risen, though exhibitions have not always been able to show his best work because it is so scattered.

Retrospective exhibitions of his work were held at the Wertheim Gallery in 1931 and the Reid Lefèvre galleries in 1932. Opinions on the merit of his painting ran from the ecstatic to the dismissive, but most were favourable. Some newspaper reviewers were unhappy about a ‘childish’ quality in the painting and about a clumsy line in the drawing. Most of these reservations collapsed, however, in the face of the Tréboul paintings, which were almost universally admired. The debate was then about the scale of the achievement; its existence was not seriously disputed.

Of the 1932 exhibition at the Reid Lefèvre galleries Paul Nash wrote that the paintings ‘seem to express, beyond almost any work I can recall, the mood and consciousness of their author’. Cyril Connolly wrote in the
Architectural Review
that Wood ‘had something that other English painters have not got and it was only visible in his late pictures; a kind of architectural pleasure, a deeper happiness at getting over to France than the others felt and a stronger palette to express it’, which was partly true, but seems to say as much about Connolly’s francophilia as about Wood’s painting.

John Piper was a sympathetic visitor to the exhibition, and wrote with slightly muddled passion about what he saw. He was quick to stamp on the ‘childlike’ criticism, though his method of doing so was not conclusive and depended on praising Wood’s restraint. Piper’s most interesting reaction was his belief, shared with his fellow-painter Winifred Nicholson, that Wood might actually have ‘realised himself more or less fully’. It is not completely clear how Piper reached this conclusion, but it was certainly interesting that while most non-painting critics spoke of what might have been and of the tragic loss, Winifred Nicholson and John Piper suspected that there might not, in fact, have been any more to come.

In London, the
Morning Post
, most conservative of daily papers, was deeply impressed. Wood’s early work, the art critic wrote, ‘was proof of genius in bud, but few of his most ardent admirers could have hoped for the wonder of its opening
apparent in the collection on view.’ To this reviewer, Wood was ‘the most gifted young artist of this century.’. It is impossible not to think of the emotions with which the newspaper was passed across the breakfast table at Reddish House, Broad Chalke.

The
Manchester Guardian
hoped that ‘the fact of his early death will not make a peg upon which to hang a sentimental myth. His work was good enough to have no need of it.’ The
Spectator
gave and took away: ‘Too much must not be made of his actual achievement in spite of the unusual promise that is evident in his last work, but it was good enough to secure him a place at least in the history of contemporary painting.’

A place at least… That was what Wood’s work had won him, and the nature of that place could later be seen more clearly by critics and public. For Wood’s friends and family there was the anguish of thinking that he might have done more; that if he had painted for just another five years he would have established himself unarguably-beyond captious remarks about clumsiness, childishness or bright young things – as the equal, for instance, of Sickert. Against this must be set John Piper and Winifred Nicholson’s fear that he had, like the swan, sung his song.

Wood’s paintings have consistently increased in value over the last sixty-five years, with the best fetching prices of £50,000 or more. The unsentimental register of the market is one way of judging a painter’s worth. Another instructive way of looking again is to focus on the watercolours. Many of these, done while he was travelling with Gandarillas in the Mediterranean, are not subject to the same reservations as the early oils. And, as Geoffrey Grigson pointed out in a subtle review of Wood’s watercolours at the Reid-Lefèvre galleries in 1934: ‘He could do [his] best in oil; but he could also do it in watercolour; and since watercolour is the most deceptively difficult of media, one’s belief in his excellence is refined.’

A final clue to Wood’s status can be found in superior criticism, such as that of Geoffrey Grigson, or that of Eric Newton, the art historian and
Sunday Times
critic. Newton wrote more knowledgeably than any of his contemporaries about Wood’s painting. He was an enthusiast, and, on the principle of excluding extreme
opinions from the consensus, he should perhaps be discounted; but the internal authority of his writing is persuasive.

Reviewing the huge exhibition mounted by the Redfern Gallery at the New Burlington galleries in 1938, Newton wrote:

In order to realise Christopher Wood’s achievement one has to ask oneself how many British painters of our century could fill a gallery of this size with 500 paintings without seeming monotonous or pretentious or trivial. The question is not a rhetorical one. I could think of three painters who could do it, but not more than three.

Throughout his early years … he rarely escaped the influence of this painter or that, and yet everything he did took its life from his own vitality and not from the mannerism of the moment. He imitates Van Gogh or Braque or Modigliani in an attempt to discover the secrets of their language, not from a desire to emulate their performance.

But by 1928 he had shaken off this dependence. He not only had discovered his own language but also could turn it to astonishing account. In the paintings of his last two years Christopher Wood can be compared to no one but himself…His nearest parallel is perhaps the poetry of Keats. His paintings of Tréboul – the church on the cliff, the white houses among the rocks – have a clarity and a lyrical intensity that take one right back to Piero della Francesca.